Electronic mail (email) marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses email messages as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to one or more recipients. Marketing via email represents a significant opportunity to marketers due to its broad reach and measured efficacy. A major deficiency of email, however, is that the most commonly used email systems have limited abilities to support the generation and transmission of email messages that deliver rich media content into the viewing page of an email message.
Many email systems include security settings because of the proliferation of spam and email viruses. These security settings often prevent users from viewing video, audio and FLASH animations embedded in a received email message. One consequence of these security settings is that email marketing has suffered from an inability to send email messages to users without much more than basic text. Senders often add a “click to view” option at the top of the email message, which upon the recipient selecting the option, allows the media content to be displayed in the email message. This limitation means that a recipient, viewing an email message from a marketer, often views a message with missing content or blank spaces, which diminishes the marketing impact sought by the sender.